Welcome winter - now what do I do?

Today was the official start of the winter weather work.  What does that mean you ask?  Well it means that I better have all the hoses drained and mostly put away in the garden shed, along with the tomato cages.  Guess what - this is not yet completed.  I am about 85% done with this. 

Today I started washing ghosts.  I have the ghost kids mostly done, and the ghosts that lined the retaining wall along with about half of the ghosts that were hanging on the deck.  However, 3 ghosts remain steadfast at their posts - 2 on the deck and the one by the mums.  By the end of the weekend, I will have them all washed, dried, folded and tucked away in their ghost holding container until they are called upon once again in early October 2014. 

We also got a blast of arctic air so that means fireplace is heating the house, which in turn means I have to haul wood in from the pile outside.  I got the woodbox, the kindling box, the shingle bucket and the cedar scrap bucket filled up once again and in their spots around the fireplace. 

Of course the wood piles outside are holding steady and slowly giving up their logs to heat the house.  If you can see any numbers on the ends let me know, I seem to grab the 90 degree ones when I already have the house in the mid 80s.  Currently, one log at a time and we are comfortable at 82-84.

This is going to be my daily life for the next few months.  Oh sure, there will be the occasional holiday dinner with the extended family.  There will be a little bit of decorating the house for the holidays.  Which will then lead to the un-Christmas decorating in January.  I have a wonderful snowman collection that will be going up after Thanksgiving and will stay up until the end of March. 

My goal is to have Halloween packed up and put away by Thanksgiving.  Hopefully in doing that I will also find some missing items that have been misplaced during the month of October because of the hoard of spiders and ghosts and other creepy things that invaded the house.  Amazingly, I found something just the other day that I had misplaced in late August/early September.  Oh what a happy day was that!

I know these items are in the house because that is the last place they were seen.  I think some serious cleaning and reorganizing and general clearing out of things is in order.  So you see, even in the cold of winter when there is nothing to do outside, there is plenty to do inside and I plan to get it done before the end of the year!!!!

Have a Happy Thanksgiving and may the start of this holiday season find you surrounded by family and friends, loved ones, happiness and simple pleasures.